“There is a creature in my throat”

There is a creature in my throat
That I find and have found unchained,
It hisses words in darkness
That I cannot bear to write.

I am no Dickinson,
Nor Eliot, Whitman or Wilde.
My words are rough and undefined
With tender inspiration,
I am a stone, unweathered.
My words beat against nature
Yielding only flesh and bone.

This is what I must say:
I cannot be who I am not,
But I must be who I am.
We are our own poets
Who we never thought to be—

The beast that whispers in the quiet:
This is your poetry aching to clamber
Through your teeth and greet the world —
You are not them;
For you are yourself.

Yourself, a beastly poet,
With words like wildfire that
Emerge to start a blaze within them
That cannot die.

Written in celebration of World Poetry Day!